HUBERT DYASI: "One of the things that's happened
in the national science education standards, which is very
good, is that they finally reveal the broad scope of science
 and it is not just subject matter  and inquiry is part
of the content. And I think that's a fundamentally important
aspect. There's also something that the standards talk about
when theyre talking about science inquiry  the national
science education standards refer to scientific literacy:
that at least, even those people who are not going to be scientists
should be aware of the nature of scientific knowledge and
how it is developed, and to be aware that there is a role
for evidence, and that there is a role for questions and for
framing questions in a certain way and once again, it doesn't
happen if we are just presenting science to students as factual
material."

KAREN WORTH: "There is, I hope, a growing sense
that'swhat's important for children is not
just to learn the outcomes of math, or the outcomes of products
of science, but to learn the process by which that knowledge
is acquired and to be part of and participate so that they
become, in some ways, science learners. Even if they never
become scientists, their world is still a world to be explored
with the strategies of scientific inquiry. So it's really
understanding the origins and where that knowledge comes from
that is profoundly important for the process, for children
to learn, especially nowadays when so much of what they see
on TV, read in the newspapers as they grow older, comes with
this statement of this is true. They need to learn
to ask how do we know if it's true and is
it true and should we look at it another different
way. Where is the evidence, as Hubert says.
Without that the factual knowledge is not very useful."

TIM OKEEFE: "I think traditionally
classrooms are viewed where the teacher is sort of the focus
of everything. And I think the essence of community is that
the students and the learners are the focus of the classroom,
not necessarily just the teacher. So say, the talk of the
classroom, if you were to measure the talk, the teacher wouldn't
be doing the vast majority of the talking, but there's going
to be a lot of communal talk."

LISA NYBERG: "When you have large
classes, you have to have some way to have the students have
a part, to be able to engage. We talk about engaging students,
but one way to do that is to group the students in smaller
learning communities or smaller support groups and give the
students different roles so that they are not just in a group.
I have a job, there's a specific job that I'm supposed
to do. I might be the leader this time, I might be the reporter,
the facilitator, I might be the art director, so I'm in charge
of the art work. I might be in charge of whatever. But I have
a job. And it's important to shift that to different
jobs at different times, because some kids will be the natural
leaders that want I want to be in charge here
 and they wanted to do that every time. But it's important
that they learn all of the roles, but you have to teach all
of the roles."

TIM OKEEFE: "Certain students just seem to capitalize
all the time with the group and they are always the ones with
their hands up where they are just shouting out answers. When
you are trying to have a discussion, there will be two or
three or four kids that kind of capitalize. A real concrete
thing which really made a difference in my classroom was that
instead of my calling on students, the person who was called
on last gets to call on the next person, and maybe you've
heard this, it's called Fist and Fingers, or Fist
First. And so when the kids want to be called on they'll
put up a fist, and if they've been called on once, the next
time they put their hand up they have to put up a finger,
and the person who has been called on has to call another
person in the group with the lowest number of fingers up.
So kids measure what they are going to say, they are not just
going to blurt out something because they realize that they
are just saying I agree with that, or something like
that, and it's not as valuable a comment  that they
are measuring what they are going to say, because they realize,
I'm not going to be called until everyone else has a
chance to be called on. And that has made a tremendous
difference for me  and then I can sit back then and just
be a regular participant in the group. I wouldn't use this
for every interaction or every conversation, but I use it
a good bit of the time."

MARIAN
PASQUALE: "Another strategy that I haven't tried,
but I know about is a student who tends to take over and wants
to say more than everybody else. If you ask that student to
listen carefully and to say something interesting about what
someone else has said, it puts them in that listening role,
instead of that speaking role, I want you to really
listen to Tim and tell me something interesting or new that
you've heard. So it kind of reverses the role.

CHRIS COLLIER: "It's really important to establish an environment
with students in which they feel respected, it's a trusting
environment, it's safe to say things without anybody laughing
at them or not accepting their answers. And I model that from
the very first day with kids, that everything we say is accepted
is and everything we say is worth listening to."

Judith Johnson: "And they all
do that right from the beginning, I'll bet."

Chris Collier : "They don't at
the very beginning, but you go on and you say, no no,
let's listen to what Kyle is saying or Tom's saying, they
are making a good point, and you show that you value
what everyone has to say in the classroom and they begin to
value what each other has to say. At times we process how
a conversation went, sometimes in their small groups when
they are talking with each other, Ill listen in and
then process with them afterwards, and then we talk about
how the conversation went as a whole group. Did we feel
respected? Were all ideas accepted? And that keeps us
going in the right direction."

LISA NYBERG: "Each class that comes into your
room  each group of kids has a different kind of background
knowledge. Sometimes we assume, I've been teaching for
10 years or 15 years, and we think well, I've
done this before, but it's new every year. So it's really
important to assess prior knowledge so that you know what
the kids have as tools when you begin, so you don't repeat
information and so that you don't jump way ahead to areas
where they are not prepared."

KAREN WORTH: "The other thing is, from the children's point of view,
when you launch an activity the way you did with the KWL or
other ways of doing it, it's a chance for the children to
get in touch with what they know, because they don't always
know what they know. They don't always make the connections
and this conversation lets the kids also both realize and
come in touch with the things that they already know about
sound that they might not if they were just starting, bam!
into a book or an investigation. They have a lot of experience
that they need to be in touch with and you can see that with
some of your kids in your classrooms, the way they reached
into their own experiences and brought them to bear on what
the discussion was about."

HUBERT DYASI: "But the additional reason for
students to answer their own questions, and this is an advantage,
is that it does convey what we're talking about when we talk
about inquiry. Inquiry is not just asking questions, it's
also developing ways of seeking answers to those questions
and pursuing those ways of seeking answers until we get to
somewhere, some tangible important information and understanding.
It's my own question, it's my own plans, and it's my own understanding
thats developing. Then only after that, then you could
say, I wonder what other people found out, if they did ask
this question. If they didn't ask this question I wonder what
questions they asked and how they went about to find out answers
to those questions."

KAREN WORTH: "Certainly it's important for kids
to design their own investigations or to have role in that
development, because if we want them to understand the nature
of scientific inquiry, if we want them to understand what
it means to find answers and to search for it and to develop
conclusions, they need to have done it, they need to be engaged
themselves. They do not need the teacher to give them a cookbook
recipe for how to conduct an experiment, they need to understand
what's important to look for, what criteria we're going to
consider to be most important for finding out the answer,
they are going to need to struggle with how to record data,
how to analyze data, they need to just get right into that
whole process and work it through."

LUCIA GUARINO: And if you want to have students learn
content  its amazing the content you have to struggle
with when you are trying to figure out how to make something
work or how to get the results. They learn a tremendous amount
of content through it.

CHRIS COLLIER: "I like to show
kids samples of data that's collected by scientists and how
scientists in the real world record data. I like to give them
graphic organizers, or other means of organizing their work,
because sometimes we are just taking anecdotal notes and we're
writing it down, sometimes we're drawing pictures, but it
helps to have even some organization to that, our sketch journal,
or some way to keep track of it. My students often suggest
ways, you know when I was recording this, it would have
been better if I'd had another column over here and then I
wouldn't have had to look at this other place where I could
have compared these two sets of data in an easier way.
And so then it helps them to make sense, and that's the whole
point, we have to make sense out of what we collected, we
have to make connections between what we're learning and what
we're seeing in our data and if it's not organized, if it
doesn't have some kind of sense and structure to it, it's
not going to help us in the end."

TIM OKEEFE "An important role for the teacher might
be then, when you see a child who has done something that's
a little bit extraordinary, you might say, boys and
girls let's stop, why don't you share with the whole class
what you've done there because we all can, perhaps, learn
from what you have done. And another thing is for the
teacher to engage in the same kinds of things and the teacher
should be doing some experiments along with the kids and demonstrating
the kinds of things that would be appropriate ways to deal
with this kind of data."

WORKSHOP 6: BRING IT
ALL TOGETHER: PROCESSING FOR MEANING DURING INQUIRY

CHRIS COLLIER: "You really need
to look at what they've collected and you have to have some
serious conversation about that. You have to set some parameters
up in your classroom so the kids are talking about what they've
collected and then you have to have some whole group discussion,
I have to have some whole group discussion with my students
about, what does this mean? What did we find out and
what in the world does it mean in the realm of our whole investigation
 and that causes some long conversations."

HUBERT DYASI "There's a value
in having groups of students, the working group, visit other
groups and share their findings and their data and what they
are doing  because then, in this processing for meaning,
I think the teacher wants it to be a common occurrence that
some students might even say, now wait a minute, when
we visit at such and such a table, so and so and so and so,
that group, was doing some very interesting things which were
different from what we're doing  or were similar to what
we're doing. And I think the teacher then says, maybe
that's a group that has not said anything  and then says
well, can we have that group say what they did?"

MARIAN PASQUALE: "I think too,
this is where questioning strategies by the teacher are critical,
because it's not getting kids just to share their ideas and
wonderings, as you were saying, Virginia  questioning has
to be different here. We're trying to get kids to think about
the data they've collected, what they've observed, connections,
and to bring it another step closer to hopefully the learning
goals that we've set at the beginning of the unit."

JUDITH JOHNSON: "I think that
what you said is so important. Again, we've said it several
times. But the teacher having a real goal in mind  what
is it I want my students to know and be able to do and how
are we going to get there? And what key questions do I need
to ask to bring their thinking into more of a focus on that
particular learning goal."

TIM OKEEFE: "I think it's
important to get many different looks at the kids. In other
words, look at the children through as many different kind
of lenses as you can. So you want to look at papers that they
give you, you want to look at charts that they've chosen to
put in their portfolios. You want to look at your own impressions,
your own very subjective impressions of how they are doing,
how they are working together in a group, because all of those
things go together to inform us as to how the kids are really
working as scientists."

TIM OKEEFE: "But I think
there are many stakeholders in this whole business and just
as it's important to have many different kinds of data to
look at, it's important to have a lot of different people's
input. So self-evaluation is an important part of that, how
do you think you did on this. Let's come up with a form together
so that you can fill it out to tell us how you did on that.
Also peer evaluation. I think there are some nice opportunities
these days to have parents involved in the evaluation too."

VIRGINIA LOCKWOOD: "I think keeping
assessment public, keeping my notes  obviously, certain
things  if I'm reflecting on things that are not appropriate
to share with them, then I will jot them down separately.
But I call my notebook a spy notebook, but I really
make it public and I share it with them and I think that if
we're not making it public, it's not actually going to be
a tool that helps them. There's an accountability with this
record keeping and I think that they then own it and they
are more comfortable with the sharing of their process."

TIM OKEEFE: "I don't think there really
is science without writing, and art, and mathematics. Science
doesn't happen all by itself without sharing it with someone.
In order to record data about science, you need to have mathematics,
you need to sketch what you see and so forth, so science doesn't
happen in isolation, so to me, it's just totally natural to
draw everything else into it."

LISA NYBERG: "It's interwoven and it gives an
opportunity for purposeful learning, but it's very important
to remember that the kids maybe don't know how to take notes.
The kids don't know how to make a graph. The kids don't know
how to draw conclusions without us working with them on those
skills. And so when we ask them to do them in a science situation
it's important that they have those skills and we've been
thoughtful in that presentation. And in addition to the integrity,
the individual subject areas, it's also important that the
connections are natural, that the are not forced connections,
that if we're studying worms or if we're studying decomposition
or sound or sharks, that we're thoughtful in, it's not just
that we're going to read about it, write about it, do math
about it, that it's a natural connection so that the tools
are purposeful, it's not forced, it doesn't seem artificial."

HUBERT DYASI: "I think it's important
to remember that in the National Science Education Standards
and generally in science circles, inquiry is part of science
content. And if we overlook that fact, then we will be denying
our students a very significant aspect of science content.
It is a way that has been developed and defined by scientists,
professional scientists to advance knowledge, to gather new
knowledge and to reflect upon the knowledge that we have and
I think it's such a crucial part that if we omit it, in fact
we might be talking about something that resembles science,
but it's not quite science."

KAREN WORTH : "As teachers, we
do have a direction we're interested in students going. We
do have goals, learning goals and objectives that we're thinking
about as we encourage children to follow their own pathways
and to investigate their own questions. I think we're also
responsible not just for those goals in the direction, but
for the kinds of challenges we give children. I'm absolutely
convinced that the most powerful thing for children that comes
out of inquiry well done with integrity is a sense of their
own power as inquirers and investigators. And that doesn't
happen when we make it easy, when we give them answers, when
we cut their investigations short. It comes from really, really
struggling with something and coming up with an idea of what
that is and coming to a new understanding or a new question,
whichever it may be, and really being able to grapple with
others about it."

HUBERT DYASI. A teacher was teaching
about astronomy and stars and planets and the teacher asked
the question, okay children, weve been learning
about heavenly bodies and so on, tell me about the nine interesting
things that we learned about in the sky. And one of
the kids whispers to another one and says, I thought
there were a million wonderful things out there, why nine?"